Hands-on: getting work done with Google’s new Aura interface for Chrome OS

Google has updated Chrome OS. Is it more usable?

An example of where this would be particularly useful is with something like 1Password Anywhere, a Web-based implementation of 1Password that is designed to be accessed through the user’s Dropbox account. I would have liked to make a launcher shortcut that points to the 1Password Anywhere URL within my Dropbox account.

Terminal

The only other application that ships alongside the Web browser in Chrome OS is a command line terminal interface. The terminal uses a custom shell called crosh that only exposes a handful of commands, including an ssh client and some network diagnostic tools. As we wrote in our original review of the operating system, this limited command set conforms with the Web-centric Chrome OS model. The terminal is invoked with the ctrl+alt+t keyboard shortcut.

The actual functionality of the terminal hasn’t changed much in the developer channel build, but the manner in which it integrates with the rest of the environment is quite different. In previous incarnations of Chrome OS, each terminal instance was displayed in its own fullscreen window. But now each terminal instance is displayed within a tab in a regular browser window.

Users who like to have a lot of terminal instances open on Chrome OS are going to appreciate this approach because it makes terminals much easier to manage. Unfortunately, there are some rather serious terminal rendering bugs that are tied to the change. The cursor is rendered in an incorrect position and text at the bottom of the window is often not rendered at all. These kinds of bugs are to be expected in an unstable developer release, however, and will likely be fixed long before the new environment is rolled out to the stable channel.

The Chrome OS terminal, connected to a remote system via SSH.

Another minor annoyance is that the actual tabs for the terminals all show the same Chrome extension URI, which makes it difficult to distinguish between them when you have many open. It’d be nice if they made the tab title show the remote terminal title (or at least the domain name of the remote system) when the ssh client is in use.

Another minor problem I encountered is that there are some shortcut conflicts between the Chrome window and the underlying terminal. I often use the ctrl+w readline shortcut to erase a word, for example, which the browser intercepts as a command to close the current tab.

Although the terminal isn’t going to be widely-used by regular end users, I think it’s a useful feature that boosts the platform’s appeal among a more technical audience, particularly Linux enthusiasts. I’d like to see Google continue to augment the Chrome OS terminal with usability improvements. The ability to ssh into my home desktop computer and reattach to my tmux session proved useful during the time I spent testing the updated Chrome OS environment.

Usage scenarios and hardware

The user interface in the original Chrome OS environment was so inflexible that it seemed like a non-starter, even for users who were willing to embrace the vision of Web-only computing. The new Aura environment does a lot to rectify the basic usability failures of its predecessor, making Chrome OS more suitable for day-to-day productivity tasks.

When I was writing this article on my Chromebook, I was able to view a note from Evernote alongside my Google Docs document. The ability to have these things on the screen at the same time, which wasn’t natively supported by the previous Chrome OS interface, greatly reduces the frustration of using the platform.

I encountered many situations where overlapping windows came in handy while I was testing Aura on my Chromebook this week: looking at reference documentation while writing code, editing an HTML document while looking at the resulting Web page in a browser window, and looking at e-mail messages while creating appointments in my calendar. The superior multitasking model does much to enrich the Chromebook’s usefulness as a productivity device, which will help differentiate it from tablets and other similarly-constrained products.

In a regular consumer environment, Chromebooks are best-suited to serve as a third or fourth computer. They are intended to be an effortless window into the Web that you can easily tote around the house. In that capacity, they are going to tend to compete with tablets. For raw Web browsing, I think most consumers would generally favor a tablet over a Chromebook.

Where the Chromebook wins is in certain productivity and casual computing scenarios where the user’s multitasking and text input requirements are prohibitively intensive for a tablet: composing an e-mail in the kitchen, instant messaging in front of the television, or drafting short fiction at the local coffee shop. In those kinds of situations, the Chromebook’s combination of a laptop form factor and low-hassle software start to look appealing.

Of course, the Chromebook is also a good fit for the modern flavor of thin-client mobile business computing. The ease with which they can be provisioned and administered makes them a potential option for businesses that are tied into the Google Apps ecosystem and want to equip a mobile workforce with simple computers that have a Web browser and a Citrix client.

One of the major reasons why Chrome OS adoption has been slow is that Google’s hardware partners have largely failed to pair the platform with competitively-priced hardware that is designed to accommodate those kinds of usage scenarios. The Chromebooks that are currently available don’t provide a particularly good value. They tend to be priced slightly higher than netbooks with comparable specs while offering a narrower range of functionality.

That’s still going to be an issue for many consumers. Aura remedies the user interface problems to the extent that Chrome OS is becoming a practical choice for people who are already completely in the cloud and only need a Web browser, but it still doesn’t fully match the capabilities of conventional operating systems with native software.

Although modern Web standards offer an increasingly robust set of tools for building high-quality experiences, there are still a lot of areas where Web development is lagging. One critical example that is problematic for Chrome OS is offline support.

The localStorage and IndexedDB standards are fairly mature and are capable of supporting Web applications that operate offline, but they aren’t used ubiquitously enough yet to really solve the connectivity problem for Chrome OS users. A Chromebook without an Internet connection might as well be a brick, because its functionality is so completely dependent on connectivity. Users who don’t have a data plan or access to WiFi everywhere they work probably won’t find a Chromebook suitable for their needs.

Although Google is taking good steps in the right direction with Aura, it’s not clear if it’s going to be enough to make Chrome OS a compelling choice for regular consumers. It’s still a niche platform for a small audience. Like we said when we first reviewed the operating system, it seems like a repeat of the Google Wave experiment in the sense that it is perilously ahead of its time.